Lush Liverpool

Lush Liverpool

Lush’s biggest shop worldwide recently opened in Liverpool following a five floor relocation and transformation for the brand.

The store opened its doors to the Beatles ‘All You Need is Love,’ on the 15th March 2019 on Church Street in Liverpool.

Speaking to the team behind the design at Lush, Premier Retail found out more about Lush’s next step.

Jo Evans, the New Concept / Store design R&D at Lush talked us through the design of the new shop:

“The brief we were given was a photograph of an old section of a department store and we went from there. The building itself was an old department store so the design went hand in hand and flowed well.

“This store is service heavy. For example we have a hair lab and depending on your hair type we can use soft or hard water, and you can have it cut and dried. We have a spa on the second floor, with six treatment rooms and 12 beds. There is a large party area, and you can book in for treatments with your friends and spend the whole afternoon there.”

More standout features are a facial bed on the shop floor, where you can book in for a mini fresh facial and mini body massage. There’s also a coffee bar at the back of the shop and you can bring your own cup in and get coffee for free whilst you browse.

A perfume library stands at the back, containing over 50 perfumes in all and a whole library’s worth of books on perfume scents and essential oils – the largest in the UK. A vinyl nook from Lush’s record label, ECC Records, is also in store where you can sit and listen to albums. They have curated a lot of the music for the Lush Spa and these albums are sold, along with others.

Project Manager, Richard Fennell said:

“There’s also a florist on the ground floor where you can have bouquets made up, buy readymade ones or little succulent plants. They make some of the fresh product in the shop – in the basement there is a manufacturing room. On the facial counters they’ve got fresh moisturisers that have been made on the shop floor. There’s also a candy floss machine to make candy floss soap.

“The feel of this design is using materials that we haven’t used before, so we took a lot of cherry wood style panelling, which created a much warmer tone within the space, mixing old and new furniture together too.”

Jo added:

“It’s more of a classic, traditional department store, with a few new materials. There’s been a lot of work gone into trying to use sustainable materials, as much as we possibly could.”

The team agreed that this has been an opportunity for the company to be innovative and really creative.

Richard said:

“One of the biggest challenges was that there were a lot of concepts coming together in the store that haven’t been tried before. All of these things were being developed separately and then, at the same time, coming together in this project. It was bringing all of those things together when we’ve got a very tight deadline and at a time when we might not have necessarily known what all of the product ranges were. We still had to do the design, build the space and do it to a budget.

“We are lucky that we’ve got a mock space in Poole- we built a one to one of the floors, so we could test things as we were going along and get feedback from the various teams, before we put them into the Liverpool shop.

“We were also working closely with the Retail team, and Store management team to make sure it wasn’t us building and designing a shop in isolation, but with that team in mind and how they want to run their shop. They know their customers better than we do and they have a strong and loyal customer base in Liverpool. “

Jo added:

“They’ve come from a very small shop in Liverpool to a medium one to this one so they’ve grown up with Liverpool’s Lush.”

In more detail, Lush’s new transformation does look very different to other Lush stores. The cherry wood panelling makes it sophisticated and there are potted plants adding to the fresh, clean vibe it gives off. They still have their signature chalkboard lettering, as well as new luminous lettering and the products are laid out with plenty of space between them. It’s fresh, creative and vibrant.

You’ll definitely need a good few hours to spend immersing yourself in all the new services the new Lush shop offers.